What are the results of the new agrarian policy? All
workers take an interest—a very legitimate one—in this
question. Government statistics are kept so poorly and are so biassed that
they are not to be trusted. The new land policy is no doubt a
bourgeois policy, but it is wholly managed by the Purishkeviches,
Markovs and Co., i.e., feudal landlords of the old type. One could hardly
expect anything but failure from this kind of “management”.

We wish to note the conclusions drawn by Mr. V. Obolensky in the latest
issue (No. 2, 1913) of Russkaya Mysl. This is a Black-Hundred and
Cadet periodical. The author of the article, too, is a
counter-revolutionary, which means that be is a witness partial to the
landlords rather than to anyone else. He has discovered in Samara Gubernia
an uyezd (Novouzensk) which has made “tremendous” progress in “land
distribution”, more than fifty per cent of the householders having been
allotted land in one piece.

“As regards the immediate results of the new agrarian
reform they can hardly be considered encouraging at all.... A considerable
amount of allotment land has passed for a song from peasant
semi-proletarians to well-to-do peasants and speculating
buyers-up.... Rents have increased.... The difference in cultivability
between integral farms and communal strip holdings is quite
negligible.... The new law ... has helped to aggravate the contradictions
between the conditions of economic activity and its inner
content.... Perhaps the minds of the peasants are now working harder than
they did at the height of the recent revolution.”

It is no use at all asking the liberal of Russkaya Mysl
which way the minds of the peasants are working. It is not for
nothing that he has left out altogether the question of feudal farming on
the landed estates.

But it is worth giving some thought to the conclusions drawn by the
liberal landlord. All the contradictions have become sharper, exploitation
has increased, rent has risen, and progress in farming is quite
negligible. Not “perhaps” but quite certainly the minds of the
peasants are working.